I ran into a little problem, I have applied the shatter effect to a Text Comp and when I run the effect I can see that the pieces are hollow, why is that? If I remember correctly, I have used this effect some time ago and the pieces were not hollow.

I just fired up Shatter, one of my all-time favorite effects, and got similar results. Very interesting and inexplicably frustrating. I went through all of the adjustments and settings for faces and maps. So, I can confirm your situation. Looks like a bug to me. I'll try some other Shatter files later and see what happens.

I can say that's not how I remember it working at all. Shatter used to be a tremendous workhorse for me and I loved to show it off to AE newbies.

Looking over my library of recent AE work, last time I did anything with Shatter in a real project was about three years ago. Anything could have happened with Shatter or with AE's version of it since then.

Yeah, confirmed. I have some Shatter training materials in deep storage, Brian's original 6 hours or so on ye olde VHS. I'm sure he addresses this issue. Meantime, try searching youtube and vimeo for Shatter tutorials for AE. Most of them will be terrible but someone might have addressed this recently.

If I only want an extrusion, I can set a Custom Shatter Map and for the Textures I use the Color option for Front, Side and Back and everything looks good for an extrusion. If I remove the Custom Shatter Map it looks like this.

After Setting the Front and Back Textures to Mode Layer and leave the Side Mode to color it looks like this

I really don't know whats wrong there or what has changed since. I have already checked some Youtube videos.

BTW: see Brian's chapter 5 part 2 at 09:30 for exactly what you're seeing, only partial extrusions. Shatter maps use transparency, not black and white, so there are probably anti-aliased pixels on the edges that the map function is calling on.

Like you, I recall the last time I tried to extrude text as being quite simple. Since I was not actually exploding anything, just looking for a 3D extrusion to move a camera through, the whole comp was easy and quickly created. At least, that's how I recall it. I may have jumped the gun on the bug statement (heck, we do that all the time around here!) but I don't think Myl's original statement is valid either (and that's odd because he's almost always correct).